Thursday, October 28, 2010

The exploitation of the banks

Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief, proposes raises the possibility during an interview with Hugh Hewitt that the crash of the financial system was a result of a malign plot by an intrepid band of low-income urban socialists --

[Hewitt] Now let me dive into something. You do have a very provocative theory here embedded. It’s almost a story within the story. It’s the story of ACORN. And it is a question, not a statement, that you lay, whether or not ACORN knew what they were doing when they brought about, through years of effort, the subprime crisis and the panic of 2008. Explain to people, it’s just, I had never considered it before, Stanley. It’s very well done.

[Kurtz]: Well, I appreciate that, Hugh. You know, ACORN, it has been speculated by some people that ACORN was following a kind of Cloward-Piven strategy. This is the famous strategy created by Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward back in the 60s when they tried to flood the welfare system with so many applicants that it would break down. And their notion was that the federal government would then come in with a guaranteed annual income. And some people have suggested that ACORN had a conscious plan like this to provoke the financial crisis. I don’t think it was that concrete. I think that’s going too far. But in a broader sense, I do think that the Cloward-Piven style strategy had been regularized, so to speak, amongst community organizers. And they came to think that any kind of excessive financial demands on the system, even without a very specific plan, would at some point inevitably provoke financial difficulties and crises which could be exploited for socialist ends. And this was, as I show in detail, this was common currency among community organizers.

The revolution may not go better with Coke, but it's helped by a mortgage application form.